SOURCE: "Preface: The Turning Point," in Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems by Gertrude Stein, Yale University Press, 1956, pp. v-xxiv.

In the following excerpt from his introduction to Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, Sutherland discusses the evolution of Stein's poetics.

The works in [Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems] were written between 1929 and 1933, one of the most dramatic periods in Gertrude Stein's long life with literary form. The period was in a way the climax of her heroic experimentation with the essentials of writing; it tired her, and after it came her popular, broader and easier, more charming and personal works, but while the period lasted she carried writing as high and as far in her direction as she could, to a point that is still, over twenty years later, a crucial one for writing in general. Her summit of innovation, this last reach of her dialectic...